Images of Pollution and the Pollution of Images

Bibliographic Data

ID3914246
AuthorsKyveli Mavrokordopoulou (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume17
Issue1
Pages107-128
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11543431
OpenAlexW4409013914
LanguageEN
References cited17

The photographic image has been a loyal companion to environmental movements far and wide, yet a closer look at the contemporaneous appearance of photography and industrialism complicates that dependence. This article examines contemporary artistic representations of postindustrial landscapes through their entanglement with the history and materiality of photography. Drawing on elemental media theory as well as the history of science, it traces two key moments in the history of photography through two material components: bitumen and uranium. By suggesting the visual and the material as integrated concepts, the article probes a double materiality-that of the landscape and its deterioration as a result of chemical production or mining, and that of the image itself. The analysis is anchored in concrete sites where photographic materialities are made and unmade: Canada's Athabasca tar sands region, through Warren Cariou's photographic series Petrographs (2014-); the former uranium mining territories of Gessenwiese and Kanigsberg, as seen in Susanne Kriemann's long-term project P(ech) B(lende) (2014-19); and a chemically contaminated lake that served as a wastewater deposit for a film factory, as depicted in Alexandra Navratil's video Silbersee (2015). These projects question photography's geochemical origins and its attendant labor and exhaustion, and they come to serve a renewed aesthetics in contemporary postindustrial landscape imagery that grapples with the medium's own contradictions

Biology · Environmental pollution · Environmental protection · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Ecology · Pollution

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